AZ-301 Quality Control & Assurance 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A pipeline must run integration tests against a staging slot before swapping to production in Azure App Service. Which deployment strategy supports this quality gate natively?
- Blue-green deployment using Traffic Manager
- Deployment slot swap with slot-specific app settings (Correct answer)
- Rolling update via Azure Kubernetes Service
- Canary deployment via Azure Front Door
Correct answer: Deployment slot swap with slot-specific app settings
Azure App Service deployment slots allow warming up and testing the staging slot before a zero-downtime swap to production.
Question 2: An architect wants to enforce that no public IP addresses are assigned to VMs in a subscription. Which Azure Policy effect should be used?
- Audit
- Deny (Correct answer)
- Append
- DeployIfNotExists
Correct answer: Deny
The Deny effect prevents resource creation or update when it does not comply with the policy rule, blocking public IP assignment.
Question 3: Your team uses Azure Monitor to track application quality metrics. Which metric type allows you to define custom business KPIs and emit them from application code?
- Platform metrics
- Custom metrics (Correct answer)
- Log-based metrics
- Activity log metrics
Correct answer: Custom metrics
Custom metrics allow application code to emit domain-specific measurements to Azure Monitor using the Application Insights SDK or REST API.
Question 4: A QA engineer needs to verify that Azure Cosmos DB write operations succeed within 200ms under load. Which testing approach best validates this latency SLO?
- Azure Advisor performance review
- Azure Load Testing with latency assertions (Correct answer)
- Azure Monitor alert after production deployment
- Azure Policy compliance scan
Correct answer: Azure Load Testing with latency assertions
Azure Load Testing allows you to configure pass/fail criteria based on latency percentiles, validating SLO targets before production.
Question 5: During an architecture review, the team must ensure stateless services are horizontally scalable and quality-tested under burst conditions. Which Azure feature simulates burst traffic for this?
- Azure Traffic Manager traffic routing
- Azure Load Testing with ramp-up and spike profiles (Correct answer)
- Azure Autoscale rule testing
- Azure Application Insights profiler
Correct answer: Azure Load Testing with ramp-up and spike profiles
Azure Load Testing supports ramp-up patterns and spike load profiles to simulate burst traffic and validate horizontal scalability.
Question 6: An organization wants to ensure Azure role assignments follow least-privilege. Which tool continuously monitors and recommends removing excessive permissions?
- Microsoft Entra ID Access Reviews (Correct answer)
- Azure Blueprints
- Azure Policy RBAC audit
- Azure Service Health
Correct answer: Microsoft Entra ID Access Reviews
Microsoft Entra ID Access Reviews periodically prompts reviewers to confirm or revoke role assignments, enforcing least-privilege as a continuous quality control.
Question 7: A quality gate in an Azure Pipelines CI build must validate that no critical vulnerabilities exist in container images before pushing to Azure Container Registry. Which integration achieves this?
- Microsoft Defender for Containers image scanning in the pipeline (Correct answer)
- Azure Policy deny effect on ACR
- Azure Monitor container insights alerts
- Azure Blueprints artifact validation
Correct answer: Microsoft Defender for Containers image scanning in the pipeline
Microsoft Defender for Containers can scan images during CI pipelines and fail the build if critical CVEs are detected before the image is pushed.
AZ-301 Quality Control & Assurance 4
A pipeline must run integration tests against a staging slot before swapping to production in Azure App Service.
Which deployment strategy supports this quality gate natively?